Monday, January 3, 2011

Record Salaries for CEOs and Harper Wants to Give Them More of OUR Money

As Harper and Flaherty are trying to defend Canada going deeper into debt, so that they can give our wealthiest citizens another tax break, Canadians are waking up to the realization that these folks don't need anymore money. We do.

The recession may have hammered the average Canadian but a new survey suggests CEOs weathered the storm in fine form. An examination of the 100 fattest pay packages handed to executives at publicly traded companies in Canada shows they pulled in an average $6.6 million each in 2009. That's a far cry from the $42,988 the average Canadian makes and it dwarfs the $19,877 a minimum-wage worker would earn in a year.

The study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says Canada's best-paid CEOs made 155 times more than the average Canadian. "Canadians may still be feeling the pain from a worldwide economic meltdown caused by reckless financial speculation but Canada's business elite has preserved its privileged position..."

That should be illegal. We give them enormous tax breaks and instead of using them to hire more people, they fill their own pockets. Enough already.

If you forgot to wish the boss a Happy New Year, don’t worry. He’s already had one. By about mid-afternoon Monday, the 100 best-paid chief executive officers in Canada will have already earned the equivalent of an average full-time salary in this country. The gap between the executive suite and minimum-wage workers is even larger. The average CEO had earned a full year’s worth of minimum-wage work by about 3:15 p.m. on New Year’s Day.

... “You could ask how motivating is it for the average employee, who is actually the person who generates the income for the corporation, to see that their CEO is making 300 times what they are. I would think that would be kind of demotivating.” The CEO pay figures may even be underestimated owing to a change in the way stock option compensation is reported, according to the report.

Corporations used to report the amount of income that executives actually realized when they cashed in their options. Beginning in 2008, rather than reporting the amount their executives realized during the year by cashing in options, they reported a statistical estimate of what the options might have been worth in the market when they were granted.